Heads will roll (4/20/01)
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Joe Dirt. [Dennie Gordon, 2001. Written by David Spade and Fred Wolf.]
LA talk radio shock jock Dennis Miller [“all aberration, all the time”] takes a fancy to the station janitor, trailer-trash poster boy Joe Dirt [David Spade with lower-class-Seventies-retro wig, pitifully-undernourished moustache, and unusually ridiculous sideburns, and wearing several layers of grime and a tshirt bearing the legend “I choked Linda Lovelace” and paradoxically much more attractive for all this], and, in the process of prying his absurdly depressing but garishly colorful life story out of him — a tale in which Spade is is born with a hole in his head, abandoned in childhood and left to raise himself in the woods [like Tarzan or the Frankenstein monster], mocked, abused, ridiculed, beaten up, buried in a pile of shit, chewed upon by gators, carried off in a balloon just when he was about to get lucky, and condemned to an endless futile quest for his lost family which only leads him to every pathetic shantytown and rundown rustbucket trailerpark in the heartland — makes him a celebrity, unearths his longlost family, reconciles him with his improbably attractive hillbilly true love Brittany Daniel, and reunites him with his 426 hemi-head, the better that he may spurn the gravel in the faces of his oppressors: Grand Funk meets the Dukes of Hazzard. Or sort of.
I don’t know what it was precisely — perhaps the spectacle of Joe towing his enormous brown pet-rock/meteorite/frozen-coprolite around on a Radio Flyer, perhaps the idea of Christopher Walken as a janitorial mentor-figure [I was never so fortunate], perhaps Rosanna Arquette’s explanation of how she couldn’t bear the thought of her parents getting turned into gator shit — but at some point I abandoned my critical pretensions and admitted to myself I thought all this was pretty funny; and, moreover, beneath the heap of turds, a very shrewd parody of the cloying sentimentality of the Hollywood comedy — which always does seem to end, as the authors suggest, by playing the country-music song backwards and bringing your dog back to life. — As for what to do when your dog’s gonads are frozen to the porch, you’ll have to see this yourself to find out. But don’t expect me to admit that I recommended it.
____________Pair production (4/4/01)
